1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to facilitating communication over a data network. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a system and method for facilitating hash-based forwarding of packets with hierarchically structured variable-length identifiers over Ethernet.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of information exchanges, from online movie viewing to daily news delivery, retail sales, and instant messaging, are conducted online. An increasing number of Internet applications are also becoming mobile. However, the current Internet operates on a largely location-based addressing scheme. The two most ubiquitous protocols, the Internet Protocol (IP) and Ethernet protocol, are both based on location-based addresses. That is, a consumer of content can only receive the content by explicitly requesting the content from an address (e.g., IP address or Ethernet media access control (MAC) address) closely associated with a physical object or location. This restrictive addressing scheme is becoming progressively inadequate for meeting the ever-changing network demands.
Recently, content centric network (CCN) architectures have been proposed in the industry. CCN brings a new approach to content transport. Instead of having network traffic viewed at the application level as end-to-end conversations over which content travels, content is requested or returned based on its unique name, and the network is responsible for routing content from the provider to the consumer. Note that content includes data that can be transported in the communication system, including any form of data such as text, images, video, and/or audio. A consumer and a provider can be a person at a computer or an automated process inside or outside the CCN. A piece of content can refer to the entire content or a respective portion of the content. For example, a newspaper article might be represented by multiple pieces of content embodied as data packets. A piece of content can also be associated with meta-data describing or augmenting the piece of content with information such as authentication data, creation date, content owner, etc.
In CCN, content objects and interests are identified by their names, which is typically a hierarchically structured variable-length identifier (HSVLI). Because these names have variable lengths, it is difficult to forward packets with HSVLIs at line speed with high throughput. In addition, there are a number of challenges in forwarding such packets over Ethernet.